Just thought about this the other day, but if you think about how a millennial aged European learned English as a second language, it's basically all input?

The approached they used to acquire English as a second language is very different to the approach used in language learning subreddits.

I often see Brazilian, South Koreans, looking for language exchange partners to practice speaking English. I'm not trashing this method, but how helpful is it really?

If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?

These countries run on their native languages. A German living in Germany hardly ever speaks English. A Swede living in Sweden hardly ever speak English (maybe it's different for Gen Alpha).

In fact, the only time a Swede/German ever really speaks English is if they're out traveling abroad or they're gamers and talk on voice chat. Tons of people aren't bothered with it /too shy to do it. Yet, they're all fluent AF.

What they did instead: MASSIVE amounts of input. Tons of these kids have been on twitch/youtube hours a day everyday for 10-20 years. Listening to mostly American English. We're talking 40k+ hours of input or more.

Nowadays you also have tiktok and stuff. In smaller languages like Swedish, the content is farily limited/boring as well so the route to just consuming English media is super low because of the small population. But if you'er a Spanish native, you have access to a billion speakers.

Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input. Yes you have some English classes in school, but you talk super little/they don't force you to talk. It's no different than a Vietnamese person learning English in school really.

Also I just wanna mention. I'm not saying that production/producing English is worthless, and it should all be input. Most of these people did a ton of production (despite orally speaking it very little). Tons of these people played games like Runescape or whatever where typing English is super important. Typing on reddit. Producing papers for school etc. They just spoke extremely little.

When I first started out I thought the hard thing about tones was to compute which tone a word had, remember which tone a word had and not misremember/use the wrong tone in conversation due to that.

Learning vocab is basically double the workload. You have to learn the word + the tone). If you account for the unfamiliar script it's probably tripple or quadruple the workload (since it's harder to relate to anything else and thus harder to remember). Not to mention most word have 5-6 different common meanings.

At that point you're looking at orders of magnitude higher workload than another "simple" language.

Eventually , with the way I'm approaching the language now, remembering the tone once you learn the script and the words are unproblematic, the hard thing is actually the produce them in a clear way orally. Would you guys agree or disagree?

What is the hardest tones for you to produce?

Is it all pitch or what exactly is it? Falling and rising tone I feel like I've figured out. High tone seems to be really unique (you eventually pick up on it when you hear nii, ron, and all those super common words with a high tone). Seems like they become a bit stretchy? (although I've noticed high tone can be a bit hard to do in a "natural way in a conversation") Funnily enough, mid tone is actually not that easy. I've been told I say dog when I want to say come, which is weird, because in my voice in my head it really feels like I'm saying to come, but maybe not... The most confusing tone for me is the low tone. How do you produce it? Do you move your throat/tongue in any way? Do you drop your jaw, try to speak from deeper in the throat? Is it like making a deep voice or is that another kind of low tone?

I feel like there's a lot of ego in language learning.

There's two schools of learners. The ones who deliberately track their time spent in their TL, and the ones who don't.

I used to be one of those people. I used to think how on earth could you spend 3000 hours and only be B1. My ego was trying to protect me.

To get a concept of how much 3000 hours really is, if you spend 1 hour everyday, it would take you 10 years to reach B1 (3000 hours).

Having recently started to track my hours, I'm genuinely shock at how much time I'm spending, and how long it really takes to see meaningful progress. I looked at the number for the first time lately. I'm already at 207 hours since I started tracking, I literally thought I had around 70 hours.

My suspecision is that people who claim 500, 700 hours etc in a language but who don't track, you can safely mutliply that by 2x or 3x (if you were to count absolutely everything, include a tiktok short you just watched when you opened tiktok. Or a movie you watched early on in your journey.

Goes to show how many hours really goes into acquiring a langauge, and yes, it's going to be thousands of hours just to reach B1

Basically the title. At what point does frequency lists start to see diminishing returns like crazy? I've seen several people on here with 8k, 10k, 20k, 25k Anki decks.

One problem I've been running into lately, is to generate, or find such a list. For My TL, most AI's says that computing such a list would be too much of a linguistic/computational challenge (despite being trained on all of this data).

The issue is that to actually have an accurate frequency lists, you need several hundred million words. For my TL., the only thing I could find is something that was based on 5 million words. But the issue is that the further down you go in the list, the less trustworthy the rank is. So if you look at the word that is ranked as the 10438th most common. That is true for those 5 million words that's used for computing the list, but in reality, this word could be ranked as 8353th most common word, or the 37135th most common word (which would make it really useless to learn).

Is the rule of thumb that you just stick to top 5000, or top 3000? Then you manually add words you run into after that instead of following frequency lists?

I keep seeing lists of Thailand being ranked absolute lowest when it comes to English proficiency in Asia, which kinda surprises me. Never been to China, but how is China higher than Thailand?

I saw an old discussion on here where Thai & Chinese language was discussed. Someone said that China basically run on 100% Chinese. Every streetcorner, everywhere, it's all Chinese characters. While in Thailand you see a ton of English everywhere you go.

Thailand also have a ton of English loan words (does Chinese have that?). Although I think I've heard Stuart Jay say that a native English speaker won't really understand an English-Thai loan word (except something like strawberry), so maybe it doesn't help much if it's pronounced like that? You actually have to know the English pronunciation.

So the EF EPI English Proficiency Index ranking is given below (for Asia). Thailand got a score of 402 which is ranked 2nd lowest in Asia, and 116th globally. Cambodia ranked lowest in the world (amongst the participants) at 123th, meaning Thailand is like 7th or 8th lowest globally.

High proficiency

1. 🇲🇾 Malaysia — 581
2. 🇵🇭 Philippines — 569

Moderate proficiency

1. 🇭🇰 Hong Kong — 538
2. 🇰🇷 South Korea — 522
3. 🇳🇵 Nepal — 514
4. 🇧🇩 Bangladesh — 506
5. 🇻🇳 Vietnam — 500

Low proficiency

1. 🇵🇰 Pakistan — 493
2. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka — 486
3. 🇮🇳 India — 484
4. 🇧🇹 Bhutan — 473
5. 🇮🇩 Indonesia — 471
6. 🇨🇳 China — 464
7. 🇱🇦 Laos — 461
8. 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan — 456

Very low proficiency

1. 🇲🇳 Mongolia — 447
2. 🇦🇫 Afghanistan — 446
3. 🇯🇵 Japan — 446
4. 🇲🇲 Myanmar — 444
5. 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan — 443
6. 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan — 429
7. 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan — 417
8. 🇹🇯 Tajikistan — 409
9. 🇹🇭 Thailand — 402
10. 🇰🇭 Cambodia — 390

One caveat is that this ranking is not a random sample. So you can't interpret it as X& of people in the country speak English. It measures proficiency among people who took the test, which is not necessarily a representitive of the national population. They volunteered to take the test. People who take the test are probably disproportionately interested in learning English or curious about their English ability. They're also disproportionately young adults. The average age in the sample was 26, 85% were under 35 years old (you have to be above 18 to take it).

Finding a real list that could be extended to the general population is much harder. But asking AI, even on any list that they produce Thailand is more or less always among the bottom with Cambodia and Laos. China always quite a bit ahead (could that really be right)? Even looking specifically at 20-30 year olds, AI puts the average Thai at around A1/A2-B1, while the average Chinese is A2-B1.

When you go to Bangkok you encounter way more English than the country's overall proficiency ranking suggests. Is that just because all the tourism creates an English-speaking bubble? What can you really expect outside of that bubble in Bangkok (but still in Bangkok), and what about outside of Bangkok all together.

I'm on my iPhone and I go to google translate (in the web browser on my phone) and I do the dictation (talk to produce Thai script) then I see if I got it right. Is this going to be good pronunciation practice? Is this what I should strive for? It's actually kinda fun playing around with tones and stuff (like try to do the sue (to buy) and the sue in nang sue (book), or the different maa's.

Only downside is that it seems like AI is doing some of the work. I'm definitely butchering some of these pronunciation, but after the dictation is processed (probably through AI) to give the most likely response it sometimes gets it right. So if you do the dictation and it gets it wrong, how bad are you actually speaking at that point? Would native still understand when your voice + enchanced by AI don't?

I'm just a beginner in Thai, I'm definitely still getting a lot of stuff wrong. One sentence that completely stumped me (took a ton of tries to get right, and still can't do it consistently is this one): เราขอตั๋วสองใบครับ

It's a really open question. Could be applied to research, industry or any other domain.

Pre AI I got the impression that there was a crazy amount of wrong usage of statistics in academic journals, research and so on. Super easy to spot.

In industry and among economists (especially consultants), it was kind of depressing how much garbage you'd see.

Haven't been in the field for a few years now, so my knowledge isn't as sharp as it used to be.

Do you guys find that this has changed at all? Are people still as clueless as they used to be, or is AI really bridging the gap between those who don't really "get it" to those who do?

Played some 3v3 Arenas over the weekend and climbed to ~ 2100 CR. We all started with fresh CR (none of us had any games played this season).

Ended up making the mistake of losing one of the earliest placement games.

The first few games you're literally facing the most demonic players ever. Teams that straight up run it down mid to lose 10 games for points.

Either way, so we lost the game and the most surprising thing happened. Looking back I genuinely believe we experienced elo hell.

Because of the early loss, for the next dozen games, we're relentlessly matched up against 1400 mmr teams.

Thye mechanics on some of these players and the way these teams are playing is something else. Those teams were way harder to beat than 1900-2000 mmr teams. It's like we were in smurf queue or something.

I genuinely see a world where we'd be stuck there. What do you even do at that point? You're just stuck in elo hell. The fact that you have to play at a 2100 level to climb out of that is kinda crazy.

I'm happy that next time we're queue we're facing 2100 mmr teams and not 1400 (even if the wins would yield the same points, because those games were quite frankly easier to deal with. Every game is less a curve ball.

When I'm in app.powerbi and click Publish to website (public) and click continue, I'm prompted with this warning:
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are about to create an embed code for this report. Once published, anyone on the internet will be able to access:

• This report: xxx
• Semantic model: xxx

Do not publish confidential or proprietary information, or an individual's personal data because any Internet user with access to the embed code for this report can fully access all the data in the semantic model anonymously. Learn more

Before you continue, ensure you have the right to share the data and visualizations publicly. If in doubt, check your organization's policies. Microsoft may display the report on a public website or public gallery.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Is this a new warning? I've never seen this before. Has this always been the case and what exactly does it mean?

If I'm pulling data from an Excel file that contains data on individuals, but I choose to only show aggregated data in my PowerBI report, is that a problem? Will the entire semantic model/excel file containing those individual records be available to attackers just from the URL link alone? Can you hack any report you see published and get the full raw data files just from the URL? How?

Or am I misunderstanding this? Maybe they're only saying that anyone globally can access the report, and filter and slice the data in any way they want (inside the dashboard?)? But they can't actually access the raw data files? So if you actually built it intelligently, with limited slicers (so that you would never see individual records) it would be unproblematic?

In this community it's frown upon to learn multiple languages at a time (for good reasons). You'll confuse yourself with vocab and it's really challenging and time consuming (life time commitment just to learn 1 language for most people). Even polyglots will tell you not to do this

I feel like it's really challenging to learn a language and learn literally anything else at the same time. Like learning a language and learning to code at the same time? Super challenging. Being a student going to school while learning a language on the side? Super challenging. Feels like the time you spend on language learning could've been used on those other things or vice versa. Makes you just procrastinate and end up not doing either.

They say that most people have about an hour of Anki a day before they see crazy diminishing returns. Reason being is that spamming vocab like that is so cognitively demanding, super taxing on the nervous system. After a session like that you have nothing left in the tank. How can you then learn anything else?

I started with learning how to read and write, which I assume is the case for 90-95% of learners. The rare occasion in which you find this subreddit before you start learning, there's a chance you start with comprehensible input first.

Most people probably start learning, then they seek support/community then they find this subreddit. But there's also a few who finds this subreddit first (like you can see in some of the latest posts on this sub).

Either way, the thing I wish I did different is to "really" learn how to read and write. Yes, I started with the script, but I never really learned it. I put it up to faith that it would eventually stick (BIG MISTAKE). I looked at words, tried to learn them, read, looked a lot. Used my cheat sheet, etc. This is how people go years without really learning it.

That was such a big mistake. There's so much boilerplate shit you just have memorize and learn super well before you can even start. Memorize the **** out of that shit!

What I should have done is that I should've just put it all into Anki. Everything. All the consonants, all the vowels, all the silent haaw heep combination, the tones, consonant cluters, smooth clusters, irregular clusters, regular clusters. Everything. You often hear there's 44 consonants and 32 vowels, but in my deck I have 60-70 vowels. It's actually not trivial to count the number of vowels in Thai. Some of it is logic with the smoothness of yaaw yaak and waaw waen. For me specifically, I want every combination and instant recognition. I don't even want to think. It should be fully automatic.

That is my recommendation. The full deck is gonna be in the range of 150-200 cards, will take you a few weeks to a few months to learn super well. But don't bother trying to read or do anything else with the script while you doing this. If you do 5-10 cards a day this will take you less than 10 minutes a day including reviews piling up. Use time and sleep and spaced repetition as your advantage. Don't try to cram this all in one day unless you wanna waste your time. Learning Thai is hard and for most people it's gonna be a life-time committment. You NEVER EVER suspend this deck btw. Maybe you could if you get to an upper intermediate level and you get enough exposure to Thai everyday.

The one thing you could actually do while you let time do it's thing with with the script (the deck above) is that you can start learning words, or start listening to comprehensible input. Again, don't even bother trying to read before it's all locked in from the previous step (unless you wanna waste your time). Start learning vocab, every now and then you'll recognize stuff from the deck and it will reinforce it even better from looking at the script. Or you could just do comprehensible input while waiting for the script to become automatic. Once it's automatic, you start reading syllables, words, and eventually sentences (start with a generator that splits the sentence), then eventually move on to sentences with no spaces.

Probably not the right subreddit to ask, but I feel like there's a lot of people knowledge about Thailand here. Impossible to get a single post through on r/Thailand and r/bangkok aswell (just gets stopped by automod).

I have a Thai friend that is apparently stuck in marriage prison.

She is married to an American, but want to get divorced. She never even been to the US. They haven't talked for years. No kids, no assets, no nothing together. She don't want anything from him except to get divorced. Should be a super simple case, right?

Apparently it's close to impossible for the average Thai person on an average Thai salary. The problem is that the guy doesn't respond to anything. He won't do anything that actually requires him to do anything (sign anything, go somewhere, etc). Just completely non-responsive. But he's still alive living in the US and posting on social media.

Is there anything that can be done in this scenario except to soak several hundred of thousands of baht to get a laywer? Which is completely impossible for a Thai person on an average salary to save up? Is she just stuck in marriage prison for life now?

My goal is to reach a point where I could just say a single word or a syllable with no context and being understood. Is that realistic?

If a Thai person says a word (no context) to another Thai person, will they always understand/hear correctly what the person said? Or could they mistake a "dog" for one of the other maa's? (overly simplistic example).

I'd imagine if someone that is fluent in English, but non-native, with an accent came up to you and said flour/flower or weather/whether and asked you to guess what they said (with no context whatsoever, just a single word), probability of getting it right would be in the ballpark of 60-70%.

With Thai, all the tones makes it extra challenging. There's like 5 different maa's, 5 different kao's and like 8 different long's.

Obviously the maa example above was a super simple one. None is going to confuse a dog for something else, but what about the more niche ones?

I've come to a point now where I've built up some vocab, and I know I have to use one of the "long"'s in my sentence, but I just don't remember which one, which tone. Learning how to write would be helpful for sure. If I knew how to write the "long" that I wanted to use, I could deduct the tone. That way I'd at least know which tone it is, whether I'd be able to pronounce that tone with that syllable clearly is a whole other story.